


There's Still Time to Change the Road You're On

by isaac richard (isaacrichard)



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: ....but not how you think, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Family Dynamics, Gen, Introspection, Love Confessions, Mortality, Rick Being an Asshole, what a wonderful tag, yeah another therapy fic. we love to see it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:48:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25064176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaacrichard/pseuds/isaac%20richard
Summary: Rick Sanchez will die.Whether he goes out happy, or hated? That's a decision he must make in the meantime.
Relationships: Rick Sanchez & Morty Smith
Comments: 3
Kudos: 41





	There's Still Time to Change the Road You're On

**Author's Note:**

> wow it's been a few years since ive written rick and morty but i never stopped loving these guys. make this romantic in ur head and ill kill you though. also this is rated almost entirely for language
> 
> title: stairway to heaven by led zeppelin

He goes back to that therapist, that stupid poop-eaters counselor, because he wants to rip her a new one. He wanted to tell her off for speaking about him to his family that way, when things were better – somewhat better – than they had been in a very long time. What the fuck did she know?

Because, so what he had spent the day as a pickle? He still came home to them at the end of it.

That should be enough, shouldn’t it? To stay put, when the galaxies still call to him, every time he closes his eyes? When the stars wonder where he’s been, and he can feel the infinite universes, singing their endless song like sirens out at sea?

But instead, when Dr. Wong welcomes him into her office, Rick sits on the couch of a therapist like he had been avoiding for an ungodly number of years. He tips back his flask, and he waits, regretting doing this on Earth.

“Did you need something, Mr. Sanchez?” her tone is clipped, little accent in it despite her obvious Chinese descent. American born, or just really good at masking it.

Rick has one million smartass answers at the ready, as he always did. Instead, he takes another swig of the alien liquor he doesn’t remember the name of, only that it’s technically alive, the way Earth yeast was. It writhes as he swallows.

He has one million smartass answers, but he goes with none of them. He picks at a thread on his lab coat, runs a shaking hand through the spikes of hair he can’t believe he still has.

Because although he was young at heart, or whatever the nursing homes were calling his refusal to die yet, Rick knew he was old. Elderly, even, though the word makes him want to disintegrate himself into the carpet. He might live in every universe – but he wouldn’t live forever. Everything died. Even the sun would supernova.

Supernova, he would too. Rick Sanchez would go out in a blaze of awesome glory, as it was foretold in his bad-ass life previous. The world would stop when they finally killed him, finally hunted him down –

He has one million answers, but he goes with, “I didn’t mean to leave her, you bitch.”

And Dr. Wong looks at him over her thick glasses, considering him. “Go on,” she says.

Beth was young. He doesn’t remember exactly how young, because it was forty-odd years ago, but she was younger than ten. He’d hold onto her, or try to, while on the run, skipping through the universe and dodging the Federation. He owned a guitar, a portal gun, and a picture of Beth. Everything else was up to chance, and he gambled with every breath he took.

But Beth grows up without him because, a child’s development is certain. They don’t wait for Daddy to come home to get big, and the one picture of his baby girl quickly means little, when she matures into a young woman he doesn’t know.

Her mother died, while he was gone. He doesn’t know when, or how, or even where the grave is. He chose not to go looking, because it would be another problem on top of all the rest. He and his ex-wife hadn’t been on great terms since before Morty’s birth. For the same old reasons – he left, he was an asshole. He was _their_ asshole, and he left them anyway.

He can’t say he doesn’t feel guilty. He wishes terribly that he could, wishes he could really be the ineffable god he so often made himself out to be. But he isn’t – he hasn’t deluded himself enough to refute simple facts, scientific truths. He had fucked up, majorly. He should have been smarter, faster, moved realities quicker than he had. Covered up their trail better than he had.

But he hadn’t. And it had cost him everything.

“Is that all?” Dr. Wong says, and it occurs to him that she’s therapizing him. What else would she be doing, with him on her couch? But it’s a realization – an observation – that he hates.

“What more do you want?” he asks, and he’s suddenly a very tired old man. “I don’t have much else to offer, lady.”

“Why did you come back?” Wong asks, mildly, like they were discussing the weather. “Your daughter dropped the issue, and you returned without her. Why?”

That was a good question, and though Rick tells himself the answer is blowing off steam – ripping into a poor therapist as “blowing off steam” – that wasn’t the whole truth, or he’d be screaming in her face. But he wasn’t. He hadn’t even stormed off in a fit of rage.

“Because –“

Because Rick Sanchez was the smartest man in any universe, and he was still a fucking moron. He had taken fat dumps all over all his personal relationships, and he has no idea where to start bleaching.

Because his daughter drinks too much wine, cries like he can’t hear her over the shower. Because his granddaughter huffs enamel, or whatever it was, and they had ignored her completely.

Because Rick knew more than everyone else, and they still managed to find more comfort in life than he could. Because stupid people were content, ignorance was bliss, and Rick was the smartest man alive.

Because Morty –

His Morty. The only one he’d ever get, because despite the way Ricks played like their Morties meant nothing, Morties meant everything. Because, in the realities where Morty is never born – whether Jerry doesn’t exist, or Beth passes away after having Summer, or the million other circumstances that could happen – Ricks don’t return home. A Morty is a purpose, and Rick is lucky enough to have kept his alive this long.

But even more than that. Because his Morty isn’t just his Morty, because he isn’t just a Rick. Because even if the Citadel had forgotten – a Rick is an anomaly in his singular form. When you try to make anomalies follow the rules, eventually, one falls out of line.

“Because –“ Rick waves his thin hands in his frustration, his multiply-burned, scarred, stabbed hands, that he had healed and re-broken countless times. He had seen more than the Wong woman ever will, but he can tell, just from the ring secured on her finger and the healthy glow to her face, that she is happier than he’ll ever be.

“Because, I don’t know. Shit. I’m tired. I’m gonna die.” He takes a pull from his flask. “Do I need more reason than that?”

“We’re all going to die, Mr. Sanchez,” Dr. Wong counters, and that makes him smile, just a bit of stained teeth under his lip. “How you go out is up to you. Will you die a happy man, or a hated one?”

“Hated,” he says, easily. “And not just by my family.”

“And you’ll take that? Belly-up, like a coward?”

Morty had called him afraid, once, in a less college-level word than _coward._ On an adventure in an endless underwater cave, where he’d managed to get them lost. He’d put Morty in a coma, to shut him up and figure the way out, but he had ultimately been right. Rick had been afraid.

He had always been afraid. Before the portals, and the Council, and the Morties, and even before Beth and her mother – there was a nagging fear, of the size of the universe. All the universes. There was the biggest unknown, right outside humanity’s doorstep, and no one saw it but him.

There was no way to know – none, no matter how many devices he’d tried to rig to calculate risk – what was out there. What was evolving, or dying, and rising out of the ashes. The universe was living, breathing, pulsing bundle of nerves and light, so much like the human body in the way that it grew and changed.

And Rick was terrified. Had been for a heavy handful of decades.

“No,” he says. “It’s not cowardly if it’s fate.”

“You don’t believe in fate,” Wong counters, and Rick thinks that it’s a bold statement for her to be making this early in the game. Even if it’s true.

Rick hurls his flask across the room, slamming it into the wall behind Wong and splattering a landscape portrait with liquor. He lets out a violent little noise, like he had stepped on something sharp.

“That was unnecessary,” she says, unphased.

“I’ll p-pay for it,” he growls, hating the way his anger makes him stutter. Always, even after all these years, whether sober or drunk, he'd never completely escaped his vocal tics.

“That’s not what I said.”

“Do you not want me to pay for it?”

Wong doesn’t respond, and that burns him up. She was refusing to be provoked, and Rick wanted a fight.

“You’re angry, Rick,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s used his first name. He doesn’t know what he should make of that. “What for?”

He scoffs. “Because there are starving children in Africa, and my heart bled a little too hard. I’m all drained out from my deeply compassionate youth.”

Wong waits. Rick stares her down, but she just keeps on waiting, with that stupid, placid expression of hers, like the long-suffering mother of a whiny child. Used to the antics, the bullshit, of an old loon like him. Probably saw the same kind of asshole in his seat, day after day.

Rick sighs. “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that.”

“All in a day’s work,” Wong replies, modest. She keeps on waiting.

“Because Morty.”

“Your grandson.”

“Who else?”

Morty – who still believes Rick hung the moon, but not with the open kind of adoration he’d once had. He was growing wary, and Rick could practically see the day when he became wise, found friends his own age who weren’t mean and old and crazy. He could feel another one slipping through his grasp, but it wasn’t just _“another one”._ It was Morty, and that meant more than anyone he’d lost before.

“You love him.”

“I don’t know about that – “

“This doesn’t work if you’re not honest, Rick. Which I’m sure you’ve already figured out.”

“Fuck, fine,” Rick says, exasperated. “I love the little bastard, alright?”

“Does he know that?” Her tone is even, measured. No harsh emotion, positive or negative.

And Rick wants to say yes. He wants to say, _“Of course Morty knows I love him, you dumbfuck broad!”_ But he can’t. He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know, with complete certainty, if he’s been clear – because there are times when he can say, yes, Morty knows I care. Morty knows I would never leave him for dead, no matter how much I’ll threaten it to his twerp ass.

And there are times Morty looks at him with such cold hatred, such open resentment and distaste, that Rick wonders how he hadn’t lost him already.

Wong is still waiting. Still.

He should walk out, at this point. He felt like he was treading water – but getting nowhere.

“No,” he says, and it comes out more strained than he had intended.

“Then that’s where you start,” Wong says. “You want to die and have people remember you fondly? You start with Morty. Make him understand that a distant scientist isn’t all you can be.”

And Rick considers this. He just doesn’t know if he has anything left inside, any other personality besides “shithead”. But he can look, he will look. For Morty, if nothing and no one else.

“Morty,” he says, and Morty looks up from the trig problem he’d been struggling with, all mousy-brown tufts of hair and milky brown eyes, like a cup of coffee with a singular spill of cream. He looks younger than he is – and Rick is reminded of Beth, and how he missed her at this age.

“Aw jeez,” Morty murmurs. “You – you been drinkin’, Rick?”

“Not tonight,” he says, and he hopes his uncharacteristic sobriety hadn’t been too obvious. He had wanted to keep a clear head, but a clear head does nothing for his temper.

Morty sets down his pencil. “You need my waves, or whatever?”

“No,” Rick says, and he hears himself stalling. _Just spit it out, Sanchez!_ “B-but, hey, you know I love you, right?”

Morty absorbs this question, and Rick watches him mull it over. Because even if Morty was slow, he wasn’t stupid. Rick regrets most of his intelligence-based insults – not only was it a low, inaccurate blow, but he could do so much better without making the kid feel like horseshit.

“I- I don’t think I d-did, Rick,” he says, and Rick notices how bad his stutter suddenly becomes. “I don’t th-think I was ever s-sure.”

Morty turns to him, licks his lips in a way that meant he was concentrating hard to express what he needed to say. “Y- y- you’re an asshole, Rick. Y-you’re n-not nice. Y-you don’t treat people in the way you’re supposed to treat people, but – but I l-l-love you, too. Be-be-cause sometimes, I think, it’s not about being nice. Love means more than that.”

And Rick had fallen from cliffs, been blown up in spaceships, had been shot directly in the chest. But nothing had ever taken the wind out of him like that had.

“Fuck, Morty,” he says, when he recovers. “Are you secretly a p-poet, or what?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Morty replies, in a way that makes Rick laugh. Little bastard.


End file.
